Bringing Compassionate Leadership into the World

Bringing Compassionate Leadership into the World

“It’s about giving managers a space to imagine, understand and embody the shift from a focus on performance to being a compassionate leader. To reflect on who they are as people and what an integrated healthy life looks like for them, how they can look after themselves so that they can care for others, to find a way of being and leading that releases the greatness in the people around them.”

So says Andy Bradley, co-founder of Frameworks4Change, an organisation on a mission to ‘elevate the status of care giving’. They are working with managers and strategic leaders in health and social care; clients include large care providers as well as the NHS.

Andy explains more about the approach, devised in partnership with The One Leadership Project: “We invite them to wonder what legacy they might create”. As well as the vision and embodying, there’s the doing: “A compassionate leader is passionate about creating organisational habits, so that when they move on the habits remain.”

“This work humanises organisations, it offers a new, more humane map and paradigm in which to think and act, which creates the space for people to be seen and heard and their presence to be felt and respected.”

Andy has long experience in this type of work. His parents ran a care home for people with dementia. “There is a risk that when you use health or social care services you are diminished in the minds of others. The compassion paradigm offers a completely different sense of potential in which as a result of your encounter with care, you thrive.”

The change is necessary. “Health and social care is unravelling. The current paradigm completely fails to match how good we’re getting on the technical side, and how much longer we are living.”

Andy has been supported by the One Leadership Project for a couple of years now. “What I’ve come to realise is that One Leadership is standing for something very precious in the world; the idea that the world could change.”

He goes further “One Leadership see people like me as a catalyst; they witnessed my journey, they made me feel valued, understood, they witnessed the loneliness that can go with being a catalyst. They walked with me. They trusted my journey. They elevated my leadership. Our partnership on the compassionate leadership programme powerfully brings together the enabling-catalysts paradigm with the notion of compassionate leadership.

One Leadership are about bringing catalysts together for powerful multiplier effects. So I feel delighted to be working with people I deem to be heroes (the managers and strategic leaders), people within the care system who are potential catalysts, who maybe don’t know that yet, to offer them a thinking space, that sense of what they could lead for, and what legacy they could create.